The Wilds (23 page)

Each twin lifts a bird to his lips, sighs, and licks it clean of gravy. Each twin removes the burnt, scabby film of fried breading from his respective dead animal, wads it into a ball, places it on his tongue like a holy wafer, closes his mouth, and waits for the substance to dissolve. Tears drip from their eyes as they swallow.

“That doesn’t count as the animal itself,” says Dad, biting a robin in two. Delicate bones snap as he chews. He gulps as he swallows, and his tongue slips out to dab grease from his lips. “The flesh is the thing,” he says. “The transubstantiated spirit of the robin will fill you with the bird’s power.”

The twins pinch tufts of meat from their carcasses and line them up like pills to be swallowed whole. Little Jack eats one first.

“It tastes like pesticides,” he says.

The Runt copies Little Jack.

“It tastes like toads,” says the Runt.

According to the twins, the robins taste like hair spray, ammonia, and chicken necks. The robins taste like grasshopper meat dipped in gasoline. They taste pee-sautéed and weird. According to the twins, because the robins they slaughtered spent the morning pecking
pesticidal pellets from old Mr. Horton’s mouthwash-green lawn, the birds are probably lethal.

“Get out of my sight, you ungrateful wenches,” Dad says, banging his tumbler on the table. “You better prepare yourselves for a visit from the Great Robin. It will flap into your window tonight and fill your room with feathers. The Great Robin will terrify you with its rotten worm breath. The Great Robin will drop turds the size of shoes. Calling upon the nobility of its bird genealogy, the Great Robin will sprout the atavistic claws of the pterodactyl and tear your soft, womanly bodies into bloody confetti.”

Dad grins until his mandible vanishes. The twins scramble to their feet. Dad lights a cigarette and flicks ash into the rib cage of a half-gnawed robin. A sunbeam shines directly onto the ashy carcass and lights up stained cracks in the ceramic plate.

On a rancid summer dog day, when you’re dirty and scrawny and ugly and poor, when your fingernails sting from too much biting, when the kitchen stinks of unclean plates, when there’s nowhere to go, when punishment awaits you, when swarms of gnats flicker beyond bright windows, when heat sinks your mind into the
syrupy filth of boredom, when you are disgusted by the sight of your own stubbed toes, when the glimpse of an ancient neighbor drifting across the green void of his lawn fills you with a new species of sadness, a screen door slamming can shoot straight to your heart, plunging it deeper than you thought it would go.

I hold my breath for as long as I can. I exhale noisily. Dad sneers at me and pours himself another drink.

Even though my father may whip me in twenty-five minutes, I feel abandoned when he staggers off to the living room, snatching his manuscript from the top of the refrigerator. He closes the door behind him. I mope around in the kitchen, plucking crusted bowls from counters, sniffing them. I hear a creak on the stairs, and Mom steps into the greasy light of the kitchen. Her face looks puffy. Her nylon housecoat sticks to her sweaty spots. She plods to the stove, where Dad has left the platter of fried robins covered with a dented pizza pan. She lifts the pan and sniffs. Slowly, with blank black eyes, she fixes herself a plate of robin and grits and gravy and sits down under the stale bluster of the ceiling fan. She nibbles a chunk of robin from its carcass, and only after she has chewed and swallowed and made a bitter face does she see me, lurking behind her.

“What are these—quail?” she asks.

“Robins,” I say.

“Quit being a smart-ass, they must be quail, they’re just freezer-burned.”

My mother will not believe that the robins are robins, and she eats several bites of grits and robin gravy before putting down her fork. Her mind is sunk deep beneath her chewing, but eventually she registers the taste.

“They’re robins, I swear to God,” I say.

“Who would cook robins?”

“Dad, of course. He would cook anything. He would cook an iguana or a monkey or a cat.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I take Mom out back, where bright guts and rusty feathers have been strewn across the table by the scavenging spaniels. Flies crawl on the waxy shreds of organs.

My mother glances around the world she has made for herself.

“Get away from that filth,” Mom says, and she runs inside. I trudge after her.

She’s retching over the trash can but can’t bring anything up. My father appears in the kitchen doorway, crouched in drunken-ogre mode, his sarcastic smile fluttering with repressed giggles, and I slip into the shadows of the hallway. Dad lunges at my mother, staggering and twitching in his old madman routine. I’ve seen him dig his false teeth vampirically into her neck. I’ve seen her, bursting with animal happiness, gasping for kisses. But
this morning Mom jumps and wrings the damp neckline of her housecoat. She rolls her eyes, mutters the word
idiot
, and heads for the stairs.

“Wait,” says Dad. “You’ve got to spank Kate.”

My heart sinks. My ears become the equipment of a bat, huge and intricate, keening in the shadowy emptiness.

“What did she do?”

“She stole cigarettes. And she almost made me throw up.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“As you can see, I’ve been
partaking
.”

“Don’t you think she’s getting too old for spankings? She’s about to grow breasts, for God’s sake.”

“What?” says Dad. “This is news to me.”

“Well, maybe not breast breasts, but something. And even if she’s not physically mature, she’s at that age.”

“She tried to make me puke my breakfast,” whines Dad.

Mom laughs.

“That’s not funny. And she attempted to make off with a whole pack of cigarettes this time.”

“Okay,” says Mom. “I’ll do it, only because you already told her, and if we don’t do what we say we’re gonna do, they’ll walk all over us. But this’ll be the last time. When school starts, we need to come up with a new kind of punishment.”

“She’s got about thirty minutes, I think,” says Dad, squinting at the place where his wristwatch usually is. “I’ll send her up.”

My parents depart to their respective lairs, and I stumble into the bright chaos of the backyard. The twins are boxing amid a throng of screaming boys. The fat, matted dogs grunt beneath our clothesline, where yellow nylon panties and linty boxer shorts flutter in a sunny dust cloud. And Cabbage squats on the picnic table, picking through robin guts with a pair of tweezers, a white dust mask covering his nose and mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?” I scream at him. Cabbage jumps, which makes me smile.

“Playing operation,” he says.

“Those guts are contaminated,” I say. “You’re gonna get a disease just from touching them.”

“Disease? Like what?”

“Leprosy,
AIDS
, epilepsy, hemophilia, diabetes, or the Elephant Man disease.”

“Oh my God, no way!”

“Yes way. If you don’t do something fast, your muscles are gonna puff up like biscuit dough and bust right through your skin. You’re gonna bleed all over the fucking place, Cabbage. Green fungus’ll grow in your nose and mouth, and your eyes are gonna turn black and shrivel up like frostbit toes.”

“Shit,” says Cabbage, dropping his tweezers. He removes his dust mask and thrusts his thumb into his mouth. He tries not to cry.

“You fool!” I shriek, jumping up and down for emphasis. “What the hell are you doing sticking that filthy thumb in your mouth? Do you actually want to die?”

“Damn,” hisses Cabbage. He pulls his thumb from his mouth and spits on it.

“Here’s an old Indian cure that might just save your life,” I say solemnly. “You’ve got to wash your hands in milk and peroxide. You’ve got to eat an ant and pray to the god of the underworld and the god of the moon. Then you’ve got to find a toad with orange eyes. Lick the toad belly six times while chanting prayers to the stars, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll live.”

I follow Cabbage inside. In the kitchen he pulls the milk jug from the refrigerator and fills a large steel bowl. He sets the bowl on the floor and sits Indian style over it. He mumbles some creepy baby gibberish and plunges his little hands into the cold, white, animal fluid. Leaving the bowl on the floor, Cabbage heads for the bathroom, where he finds a brown, economy-sized bottle of peroxide under the sink. I stand in the doorway watching as he splashes the sizzling medicine into his palm and rubs it over both hands, making a face and muttering. He dries his hands with toilet paper, sniffs his fingers, and runs
outside. I follow him around as he lifts bricks and rocks in search of ants.

“Don’t want no fire ant,” he says.

“It’s got to be a fire ant, or the spell won’t work, and you’ll die and go down under the ground.”

“What gon’ happen down there?”

“Little slimy creatures are always fluttering against you, nibbling you and sticking their needle teeth in your skin. And there’s nothing to eat but canned spinach and nothing to drink but cough syrup, and the place smells like the devil’s farts, which is like burning plastic and rotten catfish and Mr. Horton’s denture breath all mixed together. And there’s no windows and there’s bright fluorescent hospital light and nothing to watch on TV but the news.”

“Shit,” says Cabbage, dashing for the anthill at the edge of Mom’s okra patch. Squatting, he sticks a twig in the hill, gathers a few furious insects, and lifts the utensil to his grimacing lips. Cabbage mashes an ant between two fingers and pops it into his mouth, screams, swallows, then flings the stick far from him. He drops to his knees. He thrusts his nose into the grass and gabbles a prayer to the underworld; then he lifts his head up and scans the sky.

“Ain’t no moon up there,” he says, fixing his harrowed frog eyes upon me.

“The devil has the moon down in the ground. It’s like a helium balloon. He lets it go each night, and it floats up into the sky.”

“He got a string tied to it?” Cabbage asks.

“Yep.”

“Thought so.”

“The moon is made of green cheese, which stinks, and that’s another bad thing about hell. There’s no one to play with down there, except babies with vampire teeth.”

Cabbage shudders and starts digging a hole in the ground with his knobby tree-frog fingers. Then he lowers his face to the mouth of the hole, cups his lips with his palms, and in a deep croaky voice recites his prayer to the moon.

“Jibba jibba, regog mooga, onga poobah, salong teet.”

“In hell you don’t have a family,” I tell him, “but sometimes, when the devil’s bored, he’ll make a fake family with the skins of dead animals and old hair he’s pulled out of hairbrushes, just to trick you. You’ll think you have your family back, but then you’ll notice that the puppets are hollow and filled with dust, and when the devil laughs at you he sounds like TV static and screaming rabbits.”

I look up to see my father standing on the back stoop, eating a Little Debbie Star Crunch and staring up into the trees. He looks like he wants to sprout feathers and a beak and fly up there to romp in the branches with
some sexy medieval witch who’s turned herself into a hawk. A warm breeze flutters his hair, and longing oozes from him, but all he can do is chomp a huge bite out of his Star Crunch and close his eyes as he chews the sticky sweet gunk. When he opens his eyes, he catches me looking. He winces. He grins. He tries to look sober.

“Upstairs, young lady,” he says in his professional voice, “on the double.”

The moment has come. The underbellies of sluggish clouds glow a sickly green. My boxing brothers, who are now trying to kill each other, look like poisonous elves. All around them, half-naked boys with bent spines hoot and leer.

“Good left hook, Bill,” yells Dad. “You better watch out, Little Jack.”

Dad slips on his glasses to watch the boxing match, and I trudge upstairs.